VIII. A conclusion on perfect language and colours
In the preceding seven chapters I have repeatedly spoken of negotiation. Translators must negotiate with the ghost of a distant author, with the disturbing presence of foreign text, with the phantom of the reader they are translating for. Translation is a negotiation to such an extent that translators must also negotiate with publishers, because a translation may be more or less domesticated or foreignised according to the context in which the book is published, or the age of its expected readers.
Can one avoid negotiating and rely on a sort of golden rule which acts as a parameter in order to accept or reject a translation as the most faithful one? Yes. We can refuse negotiation as a vicious habit if we can refer to a Perfect Language.
Perfect languages
What was the exact nature of the gift of tongues received by the apostles? Reading St Paul (Corinthians 1:12–13) it seems that the gift was that of glossolalia – that is, the ability to express oneself in an ecstatic language that everybody can understand as if it were his own native speech. Reading the Acts of the Apostles chapter 2, however, we discover that at Pentecost a loud roar was heard from the skies, and that upon each of the apostles a tongue of flame descended, and they started to speak in other languages. In this case, the gift was not glossolalia but xenoglossia, that is, polyglottism – or, failing that, at least a sort of mystic service of simultaneous translation. The question of which interpretation to accept is not really a joking matter: there is a major difference between the two accounts. In the first hypothesis, the apostles would have been restored to the conditions before Babel, when all mankind spoke but a single holy dialect. In the second hypothesis, the apostles were granted the gift of momentarily reversing the defeat of Babel, and of no longer finding in the multiplicity of tongues a wound that must, at whatever cost, be healed, but rather the possibility of a new alliance and of a new concord.
Between the tenth and the eleventh centuries, there was an Arab writer, Ibn Hazm, who told the myth of Babel in a different way. In the beginning there existed a single language given by God, a language thanks to which Adam was able to understand the quiddity of things. It was a language that provided a name for every thing, be it substance or accident. But if in a language an abundance of homonyms can produce equivocation – since a single word can be variously interpreted as referring to different things and concepts according to the circumstance of utterance – an abundance of synonyms would not jeopardise the perfection of a language. It is possible to name the same thing in different ways, provided we do so in an adequate way.
Thus for Ibn Hazm the original language was so rich in synonyms that it included every possible language. The confusio did not depend on the invention of new languages, but on the fragmentation of a unique tongue that existed ab initio and in which all the others were already contained. It is for this reason that all men are still able to understand the revelation of the Koran, in whatever language it is expressed. God made the Koranic verses in Arabic so that they might be understood by His chosen people, not because the Arabic language enjoyed any particular privilege. In any language men may discover the spirit, the breath, the perfume, and the traces of the original multilingualism.
The intuition that the problem of translation itself presupposed a perfect language is already present in Walther Benjamin: since it is impossible to reproduce all the linguistic meanings of the source language in a target language, one is forced to place one’s faith on the convergence of all languages. In each language taken as a whole, there is a self-identical thing that is meant, a thing that, nevertheless, is accessible to none of these languages taken individually, but only to that totality of all their intentions taken as reciprocal and complementary – a totality that we call Pure Language (reine Sprache1). This reine Sprache is not a real language. If we think of the mystic and Kabbalistic sources that were the inspiration for Benjamin’s thinking, we begin to sense the impending ghost of sacred languages, of something more akin to the secret genius of Pentecostal languages than to the ideal of the a priori languages. As Derrida said, ‘Even the desire for translation is unthinkable without the correspondence with the thought of God.’2
In many of the most notable projects for mechanical translation there exists a notion of a parameter language, which shares many of the characteristics of a perfect language. There must exist, it is argued, a tertium comparationis, which might allow us to shift from an expression in language Alpha to an expression in language Beta by deciding that both are equivalent to an expression of a mental language Gamma. If such a tertium comparationis really existed, it would be a perfect language; if it did not exist, it would remain a mere postulate on which every translation ought to depend.
The criterion of textual relevance becomes more important when we are dealing not with the translation of isolated words but rather with the translation of sentences. If for isolated words there is a dictionary, sentences designate states of affairs which are not registered by any dictionary.
According to certain philosophers of language two sentences uttered in two different languages are equivalent if they express the same proposition. What is the criterion for stating that two sentences in two different languages convey the same proposition? In order to realise that the sentences Io ti amo, Je t’aime, I love you, Ich liebe dich, Te amo express the same proposition, we ought to be able to express that constant proposition in a sort of mental language common to every culture and independent of the single tongues. Such a mental language would meet the requirements of that Perfect or Adamic or Universal Language that so many have dreamt of over the centuries – with which I have dealt in The Search for a Perfect Language, born from a series of lectures I gave in Oxford in 1991.3
A mental language does not necessarily have to be of divine origin, but it should be rooted in the universal workings of the human mind. Moreover, its propositions should be expressible in a formalised language. Such a mental language will then represent a tertium comparationis that allows the passage of an expression from language Alpha to an expression in language Beta by ensuring that both are equivalent to an expression in mental language Gamma.
But such a solution cannot avoid the classical objection of the Third Man. If, in order to translate a sentence A, expressed in a language Alpha, into a sentence B, expressed in a language Beta (and to say that B is a correct translation of A, and is similar in meaning to A) one must pass through the mental language Gamma, then one is obliged first of all to decide in which way A and B are similar in meaning to a sentence X in Gamma. But, to decide this, one requires a new language Delta, and so on ad infinitum.
I am not saying that it is impossible to isolate, for two different sentences A and B in two different languages, a proposition X that expresses the same content as A and B. Such a proposition can be found (and made perceptible as a sentence in any third language, be it formalised or not) and it would be a reasonable interpretation of both A and B. What I am trying to say is that such a proposition will not be the parameter for establishing a similarity in meaning between A and B, as if such a similarity existed in a sort of Platonic world before the process of translation was started. The recognised similarity will rather be the final result of a successful act of translation.
The only alternative is to discover a natural language which is so ‘perfect’ (so flexible and powerful) as to serve as a tertium comparationis. In 1603, the Jesuit Ludovico Bertonio published his Arte de lengua Aymara (which he supplemented in 1612 with a Vocabulario de la lengua Aymara). Aymara is a language (still partially spoken by Indians living between Bolivia and Peru), and Bertonio discovered that it displayed an immense flexibility and capability to accommodate neologisms, and was particularly adapted to the expression of abstract concepts, so much so as to raise a suspicion that it was an artificial invention. In 1860 Emeterio Villamil de Rada (in his La
